Godot staff are facing a huge reactionary backlash on Xitter for being "woke"
It all started with the unofficial godot discord admin dealing with some chuds and people turning their ire towards the Godot Foundation staff instead.
Since Godot has stubbornly remained on the Xitter nazi bar as a valid space for PR and social media interaction and dared to promote the Wokot hashtag and reiterate their progessiveness, the reactionaries infesting that space are now piling on their socials and harassing everyone they can get their eyes on.
Fortunately the reactionary backlash seems to be having the opposite effect
That’s good I suppose.
I don’t care what happens on Twitter. Just so long as the codebase isn’t negatively affected.
I have been seeing some drama YouTubers, who are clearly blowing this out of proportion, talk a lot about this. One thing they’ve been saying that concerns me however, is that apparently there have been people getting banned from help forums and even the GitHub for criticism.
My understanding is that “woke” is a loosely defined political term, so I think requesting Godot be kept free from politics in response to this stuff isn’t something that should require a ban.
Perhaps there were people going too far and getting rightfully banned and some innocent people got caught in the crossfire?
There shouldn’t be any way the MIT license can discriminate between “woke” and “anti-woke”. Godot can be used by everyone. This is just making the drama people lose their credibility. Regardless of what the devs views on this situation are, I could never expect them to come to a decision on this issue so quickly. Let alone act on it. Their main priority should be the code, not the community. Unofficial communities can pop up on their own and self govern.
My understanding is that “woke” is a loosely defined political term, so I think requesting Godot be kept free from politics in response to this stuff isn’t something that should require a ban.
I'm a bit 50/50 on that. If they got kinda harassed to the point where they take a simple stance as they did, then saying "please stop being political" is often used as a thin veiled attempt to say "I don't like your politics" by the people who get so hard triggered by that term, and women, and LGBT stuff, and people of color, etc.
We can see this all the time in other areas too, especially gaming. As soon as a game has a female main character, or even a female main character that isn't white, or even one that is lesbian or bi, then uppercase Gamers collectively lose their shit. Say something about Nazis? Or Russia? "HoW DaRe YoU BrInG PoLiTiCs InTo MY GaMes!" ...
Not saying that was the guy's intend when he replied that to Godot, but I can see how it could be interpreted as such when they get brigaded by a bunch of toxic replies.
This never crossed my mind, but you are right. Online interactions do lack a lot of context, and it must have been hard (or practically impossible) to discern genuine from malicious calls to remain apolitical in a situation of intense online harassment.
One thing they’ve been saying that concerns me however, is that apparently there have been people getting banned from help forums and even the GitHub for criticism.
Perhaps there were people going too far and getting rightfully banned and some innocent people got caught in the crossfire?
They've addressed that:
We unequivocally condemn this abuse. The volume of negative engagement overwhelmed our moderation efforts. While attempting to protect the Godot community we mistakenly blocked individuals who were not participating in the harassment. The Godot Foundation Board takes full responsibility for these moderation actions. If you believe you were blocked in error and have not violated our Code of Conduct, please contact us with the form linked below. We are committed to swiftly rectifying any mistakes. We firmly stand by our mission to keep our community spaces free from hate, discrimination, and other toxic behaviors. - The Godot Foundation Board
And there have been 5 people banned from GitHub due to racist and homophobic slurs, which violates Godot CoC and GH ToS.
I don't think these users were providing valid criticism. Never mind the fact that GH issues are not really the place to complain about some twitter drama.
You're fully entitled to use Godot if you're an asshole.
You're not inherently entitled to interact with their development process or get their help, etc. They aren't obligated to deal with bullshit to run an open source project.